Best Content Analysis Tools
Creating engaging content that also ranks for the right keywords has become more and more challenging through the years, especially since the algorithm of so many search engines has become excellent at telling which pieces are worth ranking and which ones are not.
There are a variety of content analysis tools out there and they tend to do very different things. Some are geared at improving the SEO of a specific page, like Ahrefs, POP, or SEMRush. Others can be used for writing better content off the bat, such as Grammarly.
In today’s article, we’re looking at the top SEO content analysis tools that can help you get an advantage over your competition.
Best content analysis software
Grammarly
We did an entire separate review of this content analyzer tool and while it does have its limitations, we’d argue that it is perhaps one of the best in terms of what it can do.
If you intend on writing your own content and you have no patience when it comes to editing it, Grammarly can definitely assist you. Naturally, you’ll still have to throw an eye over the text, but you aren’t going to have to worry about spelling or punctuation mistakes.
The same applies to cases where you have several different affiliate websites, and you need to utilize a content analysis tool as you might outsource your content to countries whose primary language is not English.
The cost of the tool for a whole year is $144, but if you intend on paying every month, it will set you back $30. Or you can opt for the quarterly subscription, which costs $60 for three months.
There’s a Business plan available, too, and it costs $25/month/member.
Atomic Reach
This one is quite unique in that it’s a visual tool, and it will display a report that can tell you whether your content is engaging enough, if it’s readable, and what keywords you are targeting with your texts.
The good thing about it is that it integrates with Grammarly, so you can use both on the go.
Some of the metrics you can check out with Atomic Reach are emotion, word complexity, sentence complexity, as well as paragraph density. The score is based on all of these.
One downside to trying this tool would be that you have to copy and paste your text into it, but this is pretty much the same for the web version of Grammarly.
Hemingway App
Whether you’ve been looking for the perfect website content tools or you’ve been meaning to try one of the many social media content analysis tools out there, Hemingway App is likely to be up your alley.
It’s extremely easy to use, and there is a free version available, so you can safely rely on that if you do not have the budget to get the paid one. Like other tools for content analysis, Hemingway Editor gives you a readability score, and it’s based on things like adverbs and passive voice use.
It also tells you how many sentences from your text are difficult to read and highlights them in red. And if you are not a native English speaker, its reports can be quite helpful.
Headline Analyzer
This one is worth mentioning, particularly if you are having trouble writing compelling headlines. The software gives your text a score and shows you several suggestions, with the help of which you could get more clicks or convince people to spend more time on that page.
You can also utilize it for meta titles since it can assist you in optimizing the length and number of characters of your headlines.
Google Analytics
The best thing about Google Analytics is that it is completely free to use. The downside is that it’s not a content analysis tool per se. However, with its assistance, you can still see how many page views you’re getting on an article, what referral traffic you have, the time your blog readers spend on that page, and many more details.
Your bounce rate is a metric that you might want to analyze, too, since it effectively tells you whether your text answers people’s questions or solves their problem or if you have to perform significant changes on it for it to do so.
Naturally, there are many other details that you can check out in Google Analytics, such as for your other pages or general information on how people behave on your site and where they live, for example.
Google Search Console
While also not a content analyzer tool in itself, Google Search Console can give you a hand at telling whether you have toxic links pointing to your pages or if there are any crawl problems.
The search analytics is pretty good, too, since you can check out your most popular pages and the terms that people most tend to use when stumbling on your website.
Unlike Google Analytics, it is extremely easy to use. While it might not tell you everything you need to know, and it won’t give you suggestions on what you can do to improve your content, it’s still a free tool that you should take advantage of.
SEMrush
Did you know that SEMrush actually includes a unique tool for analyzing content? If you already are a subscriber (the tool costs a bit less than $100 per month), you can definitely take advantage of this feature.
The Content Analyzer is a combination of two functions — Content Audit and Post Tracking. With its help, you can do a variety of things, such as analyzing your SEO visibility for specific pages on your site to evaluating referral traffic you might or might not be getting from guest posts.
The nice thing about SEMrush’s Content Analyzer is that it also lets you add tasks and send them out to other tools, such as Trello or Google Calendar. So, if you are a content manager and you work with several different people, this one can definitely come in handy.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs has most of the features you’ll find in SEMrush, so it all comes down to what you prefer using. One of the drawbacks to choosing Ahrefs over other SEO tools out there is that they regularly create updates, which means that there could be days where the data you see is not refreshed properly or you might not be able to use Ahrefs altogether.
One thing we have done with Ahrefs in the past was to cull older posts that ranked for zero traffic and zero keywords. You can use the Batch Analysis feature in the software and analyze all of your site’s pages (we strongly suggest adding all of them to a spreadsheet somewhere so that you don’t have to go through your whole site when you have to do this).
Then you download everything (also in a spreadsheet), arrange the pages based on keywords traffic and cull the ones getting 0 on both of these metrics, especially if they have dated content that’s irrelevant these days.
Do keep in mind that after you’re done with all of this, you also have to do something about your internal links. You can either use redirects, but since you shouldn’t have too many of them on your site, we even suggest manually removing the links to these newly dead pages and then resubmitting your sitemap.
It might take some time, but we have found this process to be quite effective. And let’s be realistic — if you write about content marketing or SEO and you’ve been doing so for the past decade, some of the articles you might have published in early 2010 might not be ranking for any keywords any longer.
Yoast
Yoast is a pretty good choice, but we’ve also worked with AIO SEO in the past and they both do the same thing — especially if you opt for the free version.
These tools are quite good at giving your page a score based on the keywords you have used, your meta titles, meta descriptions, and even the images and internal or external links you’ve added to your text.
ClickFlow
This tool is pretty great when it comes to optimizing the content that you have already published. If you’re not seeing enough traction or if your text is not ranking for enough keywords, ClickFlow is here to give you a hand.
You can use the software to optimize your meta titles and meta descriptions and also perform in-depth on-page SEO audits where you see what related keywords exist and which ones you should add.
Furthermore, ClickFlow can also be used for identifying the pages on your site that are somewhat declining in traffic so that you can add more content to them or change them altogether.
Surfer SEO
The Surfer SEO Content Editor is pretty good and we’ll give it that, but it can also slightly mislead you in some ways. For example, the tool will suggest that you use some search terms very often, sometimes even up to 70 times in an article of 2,000 to 3,000 words.
But the biggest advantage of Surfer SEO is that the platform actually lets you add several links of competitor pages (on the same topic). Once you have done that, the tool will not only suggest the keywords you should use, but also give you some questions you can add to a FAQ section, for example.
Try to aim at a score of at least 75%, if at all possible, but do keep in mind that the tool also bases its score on the presence of images and the number of paragraphs you have in your text, for example.
If you go over the limit, your score will drop (which is silly since people don’t really like reading long paragraphs anyway, so there should be as many of them as possible).
We’ve found that using a combination of several different tools, alongside Surfer SEO, seems to offer the best results. For example, you could use this software, and also look at the data that Keywords Everywhere can offer and perform some basic keyword research in Ahrefs or SEMrush.
PageOptimizerPro
POP specifically works for pages that have already been published, which could be a disadvantage for some people. If you aren’t keen on the idea of publishing content only to come back to it after you see that it doesn’t rank properly, you might have to use another tool, like Surfer, for the same purpose.
But the data in POP is quite accurate and it also lets you know how you stand compared to your competitors. Not so many tools are capable of doing that, so we’d say that you should at least give it a try.
Plus, it’s quite affordable, and it lets you pay for the reports you get per month. For just $39, you can create as many reports as you want, so if you have a website with several hundreds of pages, PageOptimizerPro should be right up your alley.
Ryte
This is actually a collection of tools all into one, but one of the features that work best for optimizing your articles is Content Success. All of the suggestions that the platform will show you are based on competitive analysis (TF:IDF).
The content editor effectively suggests what keywords you should add to (or get rid of from) your articles. It’s pretty easy to use.
As for pricing, they have several different plans available. The basic individual one costs 75 euros per month and gives you access to 10,000 monthly sessions for three projects and three different users. Bigger plans also exist, and they’re geared toward business and enterprise clients.
Clearscope
The reason we decided to showcase this tool here is that it works with several different languages, not just English. It’s quite likely that they’ll include more in the future, but at the time we’re writing this, Clearscope works for Dutch, Spanish, French, and also Italian.
So, for example, if you have eCommerce websites in these countries, Clearscope could be quite helpful for your business. The platform gives you info on the most important keywords you have to add/remove from your copy, your word count, your readability, and a variety of such other metrics.
On the other hand, this is not the cheapest content analysis tool out there since the basic plan starts at $170 — but if you have to work with these languages, you should still consider it.
Final thoughts
While the perfect content analyzer tool doesn’t really exist, there are several out there that can help you take your rankings to a whole new level and also help your readers engage more with what you publish on your site.
The ones you eventually choose to work with also depend on your requirements and preferences, as well as what your business needs.
Need help with your SEO or digital marketing efforts? We have lots of plans and courses available. Get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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